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Category Archives: leadership

Proactive, reactive, inactive

In my coaching role, when we’ve formed a view of the market, it’s always interesting to watch how the various players respond: are they proactively driving towards their objectives, albeit tuning for the conditions; are they more conservatively reacting in the way they make decisions; or are they frozen/inactive in the face of market conditions?

Basic errors

I had an interesting experience recently when sourcing equipment parts from a big-brand agribusiness. Having called the dealership, listened to a lengthy advertisement about all the ways they could help and then, with no-one answering, I left a voice message. No-one called back. I remembered to follow up a couple of weeks later on a Saturday morning, and again, no-one answered. The website said they were open on Saturday morning, so I drove out there. Gates locked – they were shut.

Talk or tech?

Ever been to a meeting and looked around the table to witness a sea of open computers and colleagues on their phones? It seems like all the intelligence is in the tech.  We’re relying on it to hold all our knowledge and gain insights, and our job is just to carry it around. I want us to be much better than that as leaders… much less tech and much more talk.

Enough ‘right’ people?

In my client teams they are typically short of staff. Two key reasons: first, as we tighten the business up, the weaker players get exposed and may resign or get moved on and, second, growth creates additional roles. The implication is clear: they need to be good at retaining top performers and attracting new team members.

Are you an expert?

I snapped off a piece of my front tooth last week. Happily, not painful as it was a long-standing piece of dental decoration rather than my actual tooth, but nonetheless its disappearance created both a cosmetic and eating challenge. Fortunately, I could get in quickly to see Dr Ved.

What’s your financial context?

I recently had two interesting conversations about financial context, and the way leaders think about revenue and opportunity. In the first case, the executive team was presenting a case study about a new service offering. This new business initiative was worth around $2M in revenue – frankly a sum that is dwarfed by their core business, but it has massive potential, and is likely to scale as a significant part of their 5-year strategy.

Reading the conditions

How do you set your future agenda – is it based on personal objectives, or do you research and run tests? How do you go about benchmarking in your specialty or industry? Whichever way you keep score, it’s all about reading the conditions, so you can obtain a view of current state and your desired future and, with these assessments in hand, plan how to get there.

Evolving Beyond Being ‘The Leader’ To Real Leadership

This article, written by Michael Nathanson originally appeared on chiefexecutive.net on July 9, 2021 CEOs practically may be the singular “chief” executive officers of their companies, but that does not mean they must think or act like they are the only leader at the top.

The illusion of certainty

The lifetime customer, the iron-clad supplier, the legislated right to operate – it can all change at the stroke of a pen … or the start of a pandemic. I had an interesting discussion with a prospect recently about starting or waiting. He’s looking to double his significant mid-tier business over the next 3-5 years and he’d also like to significantly increase the profit margin to 20% rather than the current 10%.

Are you playing the game or imposing yourself?

Success in professional sports this year has been not only about survival of the fittest, but survival of those able to adapt to change – just as we have experienced in business. Spring is high season for sports competition here in Australia – including Australian Football League (AFL) finals, interstate rugby play-offs and thoroughbred horse racing carnivals. So you get a good look at who’s best and who makes up the rest.

Obstacle course, sprint or marathon?

I was re-reading Jack Stack’s ‘A Stake in the Outcome’ over the last couple of weeks and a comment he made about the nature of the business race we’re running really jumped out at me. Teams would probably associate their long-term goal, or BHAG as Jim Collins calls it, as a marathon; an event of known length. At the opposite end of the spectrum there’s the encouragement to sprint towards near-term goals, often with a Scrum or Agile approach as recommended by Jeff Sutherland.

Do you live by rules or conventions?

I recently spent time in the company of Dr Kaihan Krippendorff, an inspiring strategist I had the privilege to meet through the Gazelles Coaching program. Kaihan is a business strategist, keynote speaker, consultant and best-selling author of four books, most recently Outthink the Competition. A former consultant with McKinsey & Company, he now writes one of the most popular blogs on fastcompany.com, ‘Outthinkers’.

Are You a Transformational Leader?

A Key Challenge A key challenge for my clients is that the pursuit of fast growth requires a series of transformations in their business. By definition we can’t dramatically drive up performance without making a number of changes: perhaps some different roles and people, a new strategy, a switch of emphasis in the client/product mix, some new execution disciplines and so on. But this puts an added load on the leaders, so what can we do?